Monthly Archives: July 2012

If you want a laugh, I suggest you tune into this programme on BBC Radio 4 this afternoon.

In No Extremists Please- We’re British! Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, conducts a personal investigation into why extremist parties have never gained a significant electoral foothold in Britain; he asks whether there’s something inherent in the mindset of the white working class voter that makes us as a nation immune to the appeal of extremist politics; or is it just a question of time before what’s happening in Europe happens here?

Evidently “extremism” only runs way and does not include those who detonated themselves on our transport systems and who plot daily to find ways to kill us. Maybe Phillips can follow this programme up with “No Jihad please – we’re Muslim?”

Anyone catch the Today programme this morning and the BBC doing it’s very best to extract an apology from Hague for Osborne suggesting that Ed Balls “had questions” to answer over the fixing of Libor? My goodness but Ed must be happy with his pals at Broadcasting House and their valiant attempts to protect his good name. I mean the very idea that those people in the Labour Government with responsibility for the economy and banking could have ever even contemplated discussion on such an obscure issue as LIBOR is just an outrage, right? Cough.

Who do the BBC think they are fooling with their rush to embrace the thoughts of Paul Tucker? His opinions are afforded Papal infallibility. He could be right, of course, but he also could be wrong. The latter idea is dismissed by the BBC as it moves to undermine Osborne. Even worse, the witterings of Conservative  Andrea Leadsom are now given national import since they may damage Osborne further.

The LIBOR scandal is awkard for the BBC and Labour but the idea is that it was all perfectly innocent, nothing to see, just evil bankers doing what they do, and just when will Osborne apologise for impugning the good name of sociopath good egg Ed Balls?

Listen to this, Marr’s ‘Start the Week’, and you will hear some outlandish stuff though standard fare for the BBC.

First an ‘ex-Muslim radical’, Maajid Nawaz, who helped found Quilliam along with also ex-Muslim radical Ed Husain….having read the books and heard them speak I conclude the ‘ex-radical’ may be a bit premature…they seem to still aim for the same ends just with a softly softly approach.

Then an Observer/Guardian journalist, Robert Chesshyre, who blames Thatcher for WWII, the Black Death and the end of the Roman Empire.

Then ex diplomat Christopher Meyer who tells us that East Europeans want a return to Communism because it was such a simple life style and so er ‘communal’.

Tory Liz Truss was also on but was far too polite to make any radical suggestions and catch anybodies interest.

Nawaz made some BBC pleasing noises….white racist thugs drove him to become a radical Islamist (and not a violent and empire building religious ideology)….he first thought he was targeted because of his race but when the Bosnian war began he realised that it was really his religion that was the problem.

He goes onto claim that it is a battle of ideas and not race that is now the driving force behind attacks…and that evidence of this is proven by Sikhs joining the EDL in an alliance against Muslims….a ‘new form of intolerance’.

One long practised by Muslims.

But he also upsets the BBC apple cart, though ignored by Marr….by saying that the EDL is not racist…it is fighting the ideology of Islam…a battle of ideas….and that in Islam Mosque and State are one body…there is no separation between them……both concepts apt to ruin the BBC’s day as the BBC presents the EDL and all ‘Islamophobes’ as purely racist without any reason for their dislike of Islam, and that radical Islamists have politicised Islam…when Islam has always been about politics.

I personally think people like Nawaz and Husain are merely conducting the ‘war’ in another form…the intent is to promote Islam and spread its influence and power by using willing, if naive, aides in the Establishment who channel money and give credibility to groups such as Quilliam….Nawaz and Co are following the injunction that ‘the ink of the pen is more powerful than the blood of the martyr’….a phrase Mehdi Hasan likes to use.

Everything Nawaz says has a hidden agenda.

Look at his response to Marr’s question….‘What do you make of people coming here and living in sub groups not speaking English and unable to communicate with the majority culture?’

Nawaz…‘Communities that are victimised respond in a way which is understandable…a siege mentality, they isolate themselves…they are victims and may become extremists…it is the majority society that has placed these limits on their aspirations and social mobility.’

The answer…not that they refuse to join in because of their religious convictions and social mores but that they hide from a racist wider society….they are victims….and then become radicalised.

Chesshyre pipes up…‘If Id been black or Asian I’d have been radicalised also…very dangerous to have isolated sub groups.’

He continues…‘…Christian evangelism is a political ideology dressed up as Christianity…and Islamism is a response to a very aggressive Western pro-Democracy Christian movement…if Christian evangelism were to diminish would Islamism diminish?’

Nawaz….‘Islamism emerged as a resistance movement against colonialism and attempts to merge mosque and state…a mirror image of the Reformation where Church and State were separated.’

Really? Self serving rubbish….Islamism began in the 7th century with the man who dreamt up the Koran….Mohammed…..Islam has always been a ‘complete way of life’ encompassing every single aspect of life from social, religious to political….there has never been a separation of mosque and State.

Nawaz at face value served Marr’s purpose…white Racists, police, secular society and Christians are to blame for the creation of Islamic radicals….it’s not their fault…and certainly not the fault of the religion of peace.

Let’s be clear….Islam is all about politics…in fact more politics than religion, it has always been violent and intent on converting the whole world to its ideology…and Muslim isolation has nothing to do with the rest of society shutting them out…they made that choice themselves due to culture and religion.

All of this was intended to serve the BBC narrative…however it backfired hugely as Nawaz undercut the fundamental BBC line about EDL racism by admitting it was a ‘battle of ideas’. The other pillar of the BBC Islamic narrative is that Islamists are ‘political’ Muslims, a new form of Islam which leads to violence …all other Muslims are non political ‘moderates’….but Nawaz admits that Islam has always been a union of Mosque and State….in other words if you get Islam you get the politics too…and the ‘Laws’ i.e. Sharia.

Chesshyre is another star performer straight out of the BBC ‘stable’ guaranteed to offer up the Party Line.

He claims Thatcher ‘shook us to our detriment…miners were no longer wanted, they were abandoned  as have been the ‘underclass’ and problems we have today with the ‘underclass’ grow out of that abandonment…they are surplus to requirements.’

Marr jumps in and chunters on about the banks and the ‘loads a money’ culture apparently invented in the 1980’s.

Chesshyre goes onto say there are similarities between then and now…nothing has changed…the Big bang released the Bolinger culture.

When he returned to Britain in 1987 he claimed everything had changed in society because of Thatcher…we were less caring, less sympathetic, a less pleasant place to live, harsher.

Of course that is rubbish…what had changed was that people had become better off financially right throughout society…as income studies show…yes the rich got richer but so did everyone else….and the poor got more welfare.

Chesshyre made comparison with a book by J.B. Priestly, ‘English Journey’ in which he travelled throughout England in the 1930’s.

Chesshyre claims this showed us a Utopian England that was ruined by Thatcher and her industry destroying policies.

First off Thatcher didn’t destroy industry…the unions and bad management and cheap overseas competition did for that…when the Tories left Office manufacturing was around 22% of GDP, by the time Labour left Office it was 11%.

And was the past such a golden era…lets look at some quotes from the prefaces to that book:

1. ‘In the autumn of 1933 when Priestley made his rambling journey across England, the country was in the depth of the Great Depression. Things were as bad as they were because Britain had lost its mastery of world trade. The prosperity of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, which stemmed from a tremendous increase in wealth from coal, cotton, iron and steel, as well as ship building and railways, was over. After the First World War, the world neither needed our products nor heeded our advice.

By 1933 half of Lancashire’s pre-war overseas trade in cottons had vanished, never to return. A similar shrinkage appeared in the overseas trade of other industrial products. We became bewitched as one foreign country after another became independent of our supplies. Step by step Blackburn, the thriving cotton town in which I grew up, became known as ‘dole town’.

As he made his way further north to the mining villages of the Durham coal pits, the situation became more desperate. County Durham, he called ‘a nightmare sprawling among the muck’. Northern shipyards and marine shops were empty; shipyards had been idle since the end of the war. Newcastle he thought might have been carved out of coal, a black steaming mass surrounded by people without work.’

 2. The second England was a much grimmer place : ‘the nineteenth-century England, the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways…slums…sooty dismal little towns, and still sootier grim fortress-like cities’. Finally, there was ‘the new post-war England…of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations…of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes… But what Priestley identified most sharply of all was the ‘North-South Divide’ long before that term came into common use : in the South reasonably civilised and prosperous places in which to live; in the North places of wretchedness, decay and deprivation. And although there is bitter condemnation about this latter state of affairs the book is full of the common warp and weft of daily life, the determination of individual human beings to make the best of things, the diverse tapestry that was England in the 1930s.

3.  In his fiction he was not good at inventing villains. In his non-fiction he had no hesitation in condemning the Nazis when the time came as out and out villains; but here he blames the baser aspects of human nature for the mess and squalor the Victorians created and left scarring the countryside – greed, selfishness, pomposity and hypocrisy. I have often felt we needed much of the 20th century to pass before we could escape from the cloying influence of the Victorians. And he looked back joyfully to the vigour and merriment of the 18th century, for all its faults. And this is another of his themes, that life should be enjoyed.

That final comment is of course the most telling…Priestley looked back to his own ‘golden age’…that of the 18th century….just as Chesshyre looks back to his own Utopia, but one built on dreams and half remembered ideas and memories…..it never existed….and ‘progress’ has brought enormous change and benefit.

Thatcher’s Big Bang brought enormous success to the City and huge rewards to all, ones that flowed into the Chancellor’s coffers…..by 2000 the economy was thriving and in ‘profit’…..it was not ‘Capitalism’ that ruined it all but greed and recklessness of a few and the tax and spend of the Labour government.

And what of Casino Banks so beloved of the BBC, Miliband and Vince Cable?….well it was high street banks making bad loans to people wanting mortgages essentially that pre-empted the crash not huge investment banks ‘going for broke’ so to speak. The investment banks then bet on those loans…in the US they knew some loans would be ‘bad’ but they ‘knew’ that only a proportion of the market would collapse…more than compensated for by the areas that didn’t….they judged wrongly…..the whole market collapse right across the US….maybe bad judgement….but based on previous experience…or recklessness with all their eggs in one basket….but some perspective is needed on this…..and more thought rather than knee jerk ‘populist’ soundbites and subsequent bad laws and regulations by equally craven politicians.

‘The Long View’  on R4 this morning discussed nations who ignore carnage and human rights violations in other countries because they support the country committing the violence.

The examples compared were Syria today and Putin’s Russia blocking moves to change regime there, and the Ottoman Empire attacking Bulgaria in 1876 whilst Britain turned a blind eye because the Turks were a buffer preventing Russian encroachment into the Balkans and the Middle East.

That’s almost by the by and all very interesting but there was another thread…that of the effect of the media on government policy….The British ‘Daily News‘, a liberal paper reporting on atrocities from Bulgaria made it difficult for the British government to carry on ignoring events and eventually they were forced to intervene.

The Syrian ‘civil war’ is perhaps an unusual choice. The Syrian conflict has only been going for a few months and therefore there has been relatively little historic media coverage and seen little commensurate change in public opinion and government policy…unlike say in Israel.

The war against Israel has been continuing for over 60 years and in that time the effect of media coverage is perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the conflict.

The media coverage itself is highly controversial and has sparked many inquiries…such as the BBC’s secretive Balen Report.

It is odd that a very recent conflict such as Syria’s should suddenly be the subject of a BBC discussion on the power of the media when there is a much more obvious and powerful example in Israel.

BBC reporter Paul Wood told us ‘What a powerful medium television is…a single image can change people’s perceptions…it can change the whole conversation.’

He was asked ‘Do you attempt to move Public and Political opinion?’

He replied ‘You become a government employee, a propagandist if you do so’…but he was happy if his reporting had an impact…‘and we are all shallow egotists…we try to be impartial but we like to make an impact.’

He went on to say that in Yugoslavia there was a false report of a massacre that went out on the news services….but once established as false it is too late…‘People forget the attribution but they remember the ‘massacre”

…and of course I suspect some news services know this and publish regardless because they know even after a retraction the image or idea is still out there in the minds of viewers and readers…that little suspicion that always makes them doubt.

His final point was ‘Crucially you have to get it right.’

The problem of course is that so often BBC journalists don’t get it right…don’t even attempt to get it right…no one can forget Orla Guerin’s pro Palestinian propaganda from Jenin.

The effect of French TVs showing of the staged death of Muhammed al Durra and blaming Israeli soldiers, but likely killed by other Palestinians and not Israelis, set the scene for the second Intifada and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza….which then, due to adverse media coverage, led to massive anti-Jewish feeling around the world.

The BBC’s coverage of Israeli actions has been unremittingly hostile to Israel and highly critical whilst ignoring or downplaying Palestinian atrocities.

This plays out into the wider world and is why schools in the UK have to have security guards, security fencing and bomb proof glass….in contrast the BBC panders to Muslim sensibilities and fails entirely to challenge Muslim assertions and explanations about their actions.

When a single image can change people’s perceptions and ‘the whole conversation’ it is crucial that they get it right and not start off a violent chain reaction resulting from either a single careless image or deliberate misreporting.

People die because reporters lie.

The BBC’s ‘Wake Up to Money’ programme on 5Live finally woke up to the world and started examining the claims that the Labour government may have urged Barclays to manipulate the Libor rate.

Better late than never…and fair enough it was a rigorous interview with Andrew Sentance, former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member, who said the Bank was “monitoring the level of Libor very closely at the height of the financial crisis”….But he said he “certainly didn’t know anything [about rate fixing].”

That was from this write up (I presume by the WUTM team)…but misses one thing Sentance said…’Nobody (in government) questioned the Libor rate.’

Now we know already that’s not true as ‘senior figures in Whitehall’ were questioning Barclays figures and reports of Libor rate fixing were in the papers….including the Wall Street Journal…out of which WUTM quoted this morning……‘Questions about Libor were raised as far back as November (2007), at a Bank of England meeting in which United Kingdom banks, the firms that process bank trades and central bank officials discussed the recent financial turmoil. According to minutes of the meeting, “several group members thought that Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.” ‘

The question has to be why has the BBC not been all over this story before now…Miliband, Labour leader, has been ranting on about it and calling for criminal prosecutions for bankers involved….and yet the possibility that in fact, the Labour government was itself involved has been ignored by the BBC….a big story surely?   If Bankers should be jailed for fixing Libor should not the politicians who may have told them to do it also be locked up?

If this had been a ‘Tory scandal’ the BBC would have been speculating like mad and going over every possible scenario and pontificating about which Tory ministers would be jailed.

Miliband has had a good press all day for his speech on banking with little analysis of its content or whether in fact the policies he proposes aren’t already put underway by the Coalition.

Sheila Fogarty brought on Labour’s Chuka Umunna and someone from the New Economic Foundation…a group which is an almost  anarchist economic think tank….much liked by Gordon Brown.

This is their recipe for getting us out of the financial mire that Labour left us in:  ‘We must work 20 hours/week to cut CO2, materialism and have a fairer distribution of work.’

NEF was founded in 1986 by the leaders of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) with the aim of working for a “new model of wealth creation, based on equality, diversity and economic stability”.

 This group has worked with the BBC and  Joe Smith (of CMEP and Harrabin fame) on climate change issues and policy development.

Hardly a credible group to ask to comment on banking.

Perhaps the BBC would like to invite on Boris Johnson who reminds us that we need banks….‘Stop bashing the bankers – we have no future without them.’

The BBC reduces the argument to black and white…bankers are bad people and we need to stop them earning money…for a major news organisation to adopt an attitude so naive and simplistic and that wouldn’t look out of place on any student demo is a betrayal of all the BBC is supposed to stand for and of the viewers and listeners who rely on it for accurate and balanced information and comment….using which they base their own judgements and decisions…and voting.

John Redwood writes an open letter to the new DG, George Entwhistle.

Unfortunately he falls into the usual Tory trap of being too polite and seems unwilling to really point the finger in an accusatory manner…Dan Hodges expresses thoughts I have long held about the Tories and why they so often do not get the good headlines…they lack the will to win and the ability to land a killer blow….most importantly they lack the will to tell the ‘grand lie’ that Labour so often does…..remember the one about the Tories ‘cutting’ £35 billion off the NHS budget…when in fact the truth was that Labour had promised to increase spending by £35 bn and the Tories refused to match that…but to maintain the spending on the NHS then current.

Labour gets away with it of course because they have a tame BBC who doesn’t ask too many awkward questions….it was ITV’s Nick Robinson who revealed Labour’s ‘trick’ not the BBC.

Are Tories too polite?…Well look at Redwood’s first conclusion…’I do not believe that BBC broadcasters overall have a systematic bias pro Labour or anti Conservative. ‘

That is clearly totally wrong….and just means that the BBC can carry on on its merry way….Redwood goes on to say near the end…‘There is above all at the BBC an assumption that state spending is good and more state spending is better. Rarely does the BBC give proper airtime to the case for greater freedom and lower taxes. So many interviews are arranged to regret “the cuts” and to find governmental answers to social and family problems.’  which shows he thinks the BBC are in fact pro Labour’s policies…so why not say so instead of allowing the BBC to hide behind his timid and irresolute criticisms that fail to point the finger and hold them to account?

If the Tories are unwilling to stand up to the BBC then they are doomed to always struggle handicapped by a bad ‘press’ from Britain’s most powerful news source.

Monday morning and it’s time that we put up a new one of these.  The floor is yours…!

As has been brought to my attention, the BBC hate reporting any good news for the Coalition! The headline here is that Government cuts have proven to be more effective than planned, resulting in even lower spending. However the BBC’s desire to spin this as a negative has resulted in them posting an opinion piece in place an objective report. Everything from the seventh paragraph from the bottom is just political slant.  The entire section subtitled “finances vs growth” is conjecture intended to re-balance a positive story for the coalition.

Hat-tip to Sam.

As has been pointed out to me, €16bn in Aid for Afghanistan is reported here by the BBC in jubilant tones whilst the Taliban denial of the brutal execution of a Muslim woman is parroted.  Just in case you got the idea the Taliban are murderous savages.

‘Today’ (0850) finished with a bit of barefaced cheek, or complete idiocy, having decided to discuss Osborne’s sparring with Balls in the Commons.

The complaint was that surely the politicians should all be getting together to work out how to deal with the recession rather than engaging in a political bunfight, point scoring off each other.

Well perhaps…but then how does ‘Today’, Britain’s premier political bunfight programme in its own right,  justify spending 10 minutes talking about the bunfight instead of ‘Plan B’ or whichever Grand Economic Plan we’re going for now?

If it’s all about ‘the economy stupid’ why spend any time at all on Today talking about this….consider that they spent only 8 minutes talking about Social Care.

The sheer nonsense that was spoken  detracted from any usefulness that might possibly have been squeezed out of such a subject…. The Times’ Rachel Sylvester providing the comedy….arguing that we need more politeness and good manners to facilitate a reasoned debate…she then went off on one saying everybody, politicians and media, were all ‘Jerks’.

I would suggest part of the problem is a programme like ‘Today’ in which there is a very limited time given to each story regardless of significance and during that time a good portion is Humphrys and Co hamming it up enjoying the sound of their own voices with never ending questions and interruptions leaving politicians (Tories usually) with little time to say anything other than quick soundbites and digs at the Opposition.

So fewer, longer, more in depth reports with concise questions and time to give considered answers….and opposing views.

It is not the first time that Today seems to use an item to attack a particular target.

On Thursday Bob Diamond, Barclay’s ex boss, was turned over by the programme ostensibly discussing why during the Treasury Select Committee he called the questioners by their first names. 

Apparently this was a sign of contempt for them and a ‘truly sinister policy’.

Oddly the Committee calling him ‘Mr Diamond’ was showing their contempt for him…. as he was, according to Frank Dobson, a ‘thieving banker’.

When you  think that financial services provide the backbone to our nations finances you might think some of these politicians and media stars…whom we know are paragons of virtue themselves, would hold back on the highly inflammatory language that is designed to trash the City’s reputation.

When the credit rating agencies downgraded Barclays you would hope that would have opened their eyes a bit…no good cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Undoubtedly bankers need to row back on the riskier behaviour and become less venal…however we need banks…no banks, no mortgages, no pensions, no revenue stream for government, no NHS, no schools, no welfare..etc

Funny how I don’t remember Dobson shouting ‘thieving bankers’ when Labour’s coffers were overflowing with banker’s loot….or the BBC investigating Libor in 2007-08 when the scandal was being reported in the Press.